Victories over Violence: Ensuring Safety for Women and Girls

Violence against women and girls is both a global and local societal ill—global because its perpetrators and victims are in every corner of the world, and local because its forms differ from one place to the next depending on specific cultural, political and socio-economic circumstances.

From sexual harassment on Japan’s public transport system to spousal battery in Russia, from trafficking for sexual slavery in Thailand’s brothels to prostitution on the streets of the United States, from female genital mutilation in Ethiopia to breast ironing in Cameroon, from female infanticide in India to forced sterilization of women in China, from child marriage in Bangladesh to murders in the name of honor in Jordan, from rape to “correct and cure” South Africa’s lesbians to rape as a weapon of Serbian ethnic-cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina—this list of human rights violations endured by the world’s women and girls is nowhere near exhaustive.